Users generate and access a large number of articles, such as e-mails, web pages, word processing documents, spreadsheet documents, instant messenger messages, and presentation documents, using a client device, such as a personal computer, personal digital assistant, or mobile phone. Some articles are stored on one or more storage devices coupled to, accessible by, or otherwise associated with the client device(s). Users sometimes wish to search the storage device(s) for articles.
Conventional search applications “crawl” a storage device to index data stored on the storage device. For example, a conventional network-device search application crawls various storage devices associated with a network, such as the Internet, to locate data such as articles on the various storage devices. Links to articles and associated data are stored for subsequent retrieval by the network-device search application, such as in response to a search query.
Crawls performed by some conventional client-device search applications can significantly degrade the performance of the client device. For example, some conventional client-device search applications typically use batch processing to index some or all articles, which can result in noticeably slower performance of the client device during the batch processing. Additionally, batch processing occurs only periodically. Therefore, when a user performs a search, the most recent articles are sometimes not included in the results. Moreover, if the batch processing is scheduled for a time when the client device is not operational and is thus not performed for an extended period of time, the index of articles associated with the client device can become outdated. Some conventional client-device search applications also need to rebuild the index at each batch processing or build new partial indexes and perform a merge operation that can use a lot of client-device resources. Some conventional client-device search applications also sometimes use a great deal of memory when operational, resulting in slower performance of the client device.
Additionally, conventional search applications can require an explicit search query from a user to generate results.